Читать книгу The Knight, the Cross, and the Song - Stefan Vander Elst - Страница 11

Introduction

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English polemicist John Gower turned his attention to the Crusade, which was approaching its three-hundredth anniversary. Although he was not altogether opposed to the holy war,¹ Gower argued that in his day the practice of crusading had fallen into disrepute because its supporters and participants no longer had the right motivations. The prelates who urged their flock to take the cross, he said, often merely sought to further their own worldly goals.² Furthermore, those who took up arms against the unbeliever were rarely driven by noble aspirations. In the Mirour de l’Omme of ca. 1376–1379, Gower enumerated the reasons for which his contemporaries set out on Crusade, two of which he found especially reprehensible:

The first is (so to speak) pride in one’s own prowess—“I will go in order to win praise.” Or also, “It is for my beloved, so that I may have her affection—for this I will work.”… If you will work in pride for worldly vainglory, whereby you may be superior to the others, then you must give your garments and your wealth to the heralds, so that they may proclaim with great clamor your valor and largess.… On the other hand, if it be that you go over the sea because of a woman of whom your heart is enamored, hoping that on your return the girl or lady for whom you have labored may deign to have pity on you, then you are lacking the right medicine.³

Rather than to serve God, which alone made Crusade worthwhile by Gower’s standards, his contemporaries were fighting out of a desire for worldly renown or to win the favor of women. Although Gower may not have liked it, the first of these motivations is perhaps not surprising. He specifically talks about the chivalric class, the knights who for many years had carried most of the burden of crusading, and as early as the eleventh century chivalry had found common ground between the desire to achieve glory through deeds of prowess and the wish to serve God.⁴ The Crusaders of Gower’s time certainly were not the first to set out hoping to save their souls and win renown in the process, or vice versa. The second of Gower’s concerns, however, was less evident in military history. To brave faraway dangers to win the love of a lady demonstrates another kind of idealism, one whereby service to God is complemented or even replaced by the service to women; it is to be expected from the heroes of chivalric romance—a Lancelot or a Tristan—but not of those risking life, limb, and fortune to fight the pagan on the frontiers of Christendom. If we believe Gower, then some of the Crusaders of the later Middle Ages were guided by motives reminiscent of imaginative literature.⁵

An important body of Crusade scholarship has examined what motivated those who first left to fight for the cross. Although some have proposed socioeconomic and political motivations,⁶ more recent work has highlighted the role of lay piety in the decision to participate in Crusade.⁷ Scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull have argued that individual devotion, often grounded in local religious practice, was what propelled those who set out for the frontiers of Christianity.⁸ Turning from the motivations of individual participants to the arguments used to convince them to take the cross, Bull has also emphasized the preeminence of piety in the call to Crusade. He has claimed that, although some Crusaders may also have been motivated by other factors, such as patriotic pride, the desire for personal glory, and family honor, these issues were never part of the Crusade appeal itself: “Patriotic and militaristic enthusiasms might have influenced the way in which an arms-bearer interpreted the crusade appeal: they cannot adequately explain why he should have been thinking about it in the first place. At the heart of the crusade message lay an appeal to piety.”⁹ Although individual piety undoubtedly played an important role, the critical preoccupation with religious motivations has obscured crucial aspects of Crusade propaganda, which exhibits far more breadth and complexity. This book examines how, from the very beginning of the Crusade in the last years of the eleventh century, historiographical works that propagated the holy war appropriated the formal and thematic characteristics of chivalric literary genres to appeal specifically to aristocratic interests that ranged beyond religious devotion. These genres—the chanson de geste and chivalric romance—were popular with the fighting class that was most often called upon to participate in the Crusade, and throughout their history they served to bring issues important to this class into public consciousness. By using the commonplaces of chivalric literature to shape their writings, the lay and clerical Crusade propagandists discussed in this book actively sought to associate the holy war with other, more secular matters to which arms bearers were drawn—from the loyalty and mutual obligation between lord and vassal, to family honor, the thirst for adventure, and the desire for women—and to invoke these as parallel or complementary motivations for participating in the Crusade. As the following chapters explore, exactly how they utilized the characteristics of chivalric literature depended on the religious, sociopolitical, and military concerns they addressed with their works, whether the precarious position of the Christian principalities in the Levant, the ambitions of powerful men, or the need for recruits in an era of Christian defeat and disillusionment.

Ever since Louis Bréhier wrote, more than a century ago, that “dans la Chanson de Roland … apparaît l’idée de la guerre sainte contre l’Islam,”¹⁰ scholars have argued that chivalric literature could propagate interreligious conflict in the Middle Ages. As Simon Lloyd says when speaking of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century knighthood: “A significant proportion of the literature composed for their entertainment was concerned with the deeds of knights confronting the infidel. The struggle lay at the heart of the Charlemagne cycle and provided the crucial focus of the chansons de croisade and compositions which celebrated later crusading heroes such as Richard I. Arthurian romance held up the ideal in somewhat different fashion, but works such as Perlesvaus and the Queste del Saint Graal served equally to instil the notion that the knight should wield his sword in a sacred cause.”¹¹ Chansons de geste and romances could therefore serve as “edificatory tales, with a strong exemplary content.”¹² As this book will show, however, the import of the chansons de geste and chivalric romances for medieval Crusade propaganda extended far beyond the salubrious messages contained within the texts themselves. In fact, from the very beginning of the Crusade, both lay and clerical authors imported the formal and thematic characteristics of chivalric literature into—generically often very different—historiographical writings in order to motivate their audience to participate in the Crusade. Furthermore, in line with the recent critical focus on piety in Crusade motivation, most of those who have investigated the role of chansons and romances as Crusade propaganda have argued that they served to incite especially religious sentiments.¹³ In contrast, this book examines how Crusade propaganda utilized aspects of the chanson de geste and chivalric romance to appeal to specifically secular motivations to take the cross; accordingly, it will show not only that chivalric literature was used far more widely in Crusade propaganda than has been assumed but also that it served very different purposes.

Crusade propaganda—the formal and informal ways used to further the cause of the holy war and to convince fighting men to risk all on the far reaches of Christianity—came in many forms, from papal encyclical and clerical sermon to lay narrative and song, and much of this has been the subject of study in recent years.¹⁴ However, historiographical writings on the Crusade that functioned as exhortatory constructs have on the whole received less scholarly attention. This is unwarranted; as Gabrielle Spiegel has observed, medieval historiographical writings provide rich soil for the study of techniques of exhortation and propaganda: “Historiography, as the medieval genre par excellence devoted to a ‘realistic’ representation of the social and political world, is at the same time a genre thoroughly saturated with ideological goals. Especially in the Middle Ages, historical writing, precisely to the degree that it claimed to be free of imaginative elaboration, served as a vehicle of ideological elaboration.”¹⁵ The ensuing chapters discuss a broad range of historiographical writings, from narrative history to aristocratic biography, chronicle, and what is usually referred to as “popular history”; these date from the twelfth century to the fourteenth, and were written in Latin and the vernacular, by both clergymen and laymen, in places ranging from the Near East to northern France to the Baltic. While they exhibit great variety, the works analyzed in this book are tied together by several factors. First, they all purport to narrate the history of the Crusade or the deeds of individual Crusaders;¹⁶ although some, notably the works of the First and Second Old French Crusade Cycles, are very imaginative, even these were considered truthful accounts of events in the Middle Ages.¹⁷ Second, they all serve to propagate the holy war and to motivate their audience to aid the cause d’Outremer. Third, they unrelentingly appropriate the conventions of chivalric literature to fulfill that purpose.

The book consists of two parts, the first of which examines the use of the formal and thematic commonplaces of the chansons de geste in Crusade propaganda over roughly the first century after the First Crusade. Chapter 1 describes the continuing need for manpower in the Crusader states in the aftermath of the First Crusade, outlines the origin and genre characteristics of the chansons, and examines their usefulness for Crusade propaganda. The excitatoria I discuss in chapters 2 to 4—the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (completed by early 1101), Robert of Reims’s Historia Iherosolimitana (ca. 1106–1107), and the three texts of the so-called historical cycle of the First Old French Crusade Cycle (La Chanson d’Antioche, Les Chétifs, and La Chanson de Jérusalem, redacted in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century)—describe similar subjects, all narrating the remarkable events of the First Crusade. Insofar as Robert of Reims drew extensively on the Gesta Francorum when writing his work, and the Old French Crusade Cycle in turn was heavily influenced by the Historia Iherosolimitana, the texts provide excellent ground for comparative study. These works furthermore illustrate the role of the successful First Crusade in later Crusade propaganda and show the importance of Jerusalem in early Crusade ideology.¹⁸ I will demonstrate how their authors turned to the chansons to address the requirements of the nascent Crusader states, the expansionist aspirations of Bohemond of Taranto, and the need for manpower after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, respectively.

The second part explores how chivalric romance, which gained in popularity from the last quarter of the twelfth century onward, affected the propagation of the Crusade until the end of the fourteenth century. Chapter 5 demonstrates that romance, with its heavy emphasis on secular and often illicit love, was at first thought antithetical to the goals of Crusade, and that its commonplaces were consequently used sparingly in propaganda. Chapters 6 to 8, however, show how excitatoria increasingly looked toward romance to shore up support for the holy war, especially after the collapse of the Crusader states in 1291. The works examined in these chapters illustrate the expansion of the Crusade beyond the Holy Places: Nicolaus of Jeroschin’s Middle High German Krônike von Prûzinlant (ca. 1331–1344) describes the subjugation of much of the Baltic by the Teutonic or German Order; the works of the Second Old French Crusade Cycle (in particular Le Bâtard de Bouillon and Baudouin de Sébourc, ca. 1350–1370) see Christians ranging as far as Baghdad and assaulting Mecca; while La Prise d’Alixandre, written by Guillaume de Machaut in the early 1370s, narrates the conquest of the Egyptian port of Alexandria by Peter I of Cyprus in 1365. Beyond highlighting the spreading reach of the holy war in the centuries following the First Crusade, to include population groups and target areas farther afield, the works I analyze in the second part of the book have in common the virtue of demonstrating a different awareness and interpretation of geographical space. They show remarkable interaction between Christian heartland and non-Christian frontier; as they appropriate the characteristics of chivalric romance to suit their purpose as Crusade excitatoria, they turn this frontier into a world of courtly love and adventure.

A study of the rhetoric and the strategies of persuasion in Crusade excitatoria cannot explain why those who chose to take up arms throughout the many centuries of Crusade did so. Nevertheless, the old dictum that propaganda has a target audience that, it is hoped, will respond positively to it suggests that the authors I discuss expected their approach to have such an effect. Although we cannot know what Crusaders thought when deciding to take the cross, the repeated use by Crusade excitatoria of the tropes of vernacular chivalric literature over the better part of three centuries suggests an audience receptive to the portrayal of the Crusade in terms reminiscent of the chansons de geste and chivalric romance, and perhaps equally willing to think of the Crusade in those terms. Those knights who, under the critical gaze of John Gower, set out on Crusade to win the favor of their ladies did so after many years of the rhetoric of Crusade associating it with the extraneous, chivalric concerns embodied in vernacular literature. If propaganda for the Crusade affected its audience as it intended to, then what horrified Gower may have had deep roots that extended back as early as the First Crusade.

The notion that chivalric literature affected how the Crusade was presented in excitatoria, and so may have influenced how it was understood by an audience of the Western aristocracy, adds a further dimension to an important stream of recent criticism. The past few decades have seen scholars consider imaginative literature such as the chansons de geste and romance not only as entertainments with the power to incite their audience to action but also as a reflection of aristocratic attitudes, including attitudes toward the Crusade.¹⁹ Chivalric literature has come to be regarded as a storehouse of arms bearers’ memory of and concern for the holy war to which so much of their effort was devoted. This approach is, however, decidedly unidirectional; in seeing literature as a reflection of historical understandings of and opinions on the Crusade, it mostly ignores how imaginative literature in turn shaped these understandings and opinions. This book therefore argues for a bilateral consideration of the relationship between perceptions of the Crusade and lay literature. Across the three most important centuries of Crusade, those propagating it continually appropriated literature, and reacted to literary developments, in order to mold Western understanding of the nature and purpose of holy war.²⁰ Just as chivalric literature reflected aristocratic attitudes toward the Crusade, it contributed perhaps in equal measure to their formation.